To me, it is both rural and developed. Perhaps developly rural is a good description, even if it’s not a phrase Merriam and Webster would approve. But, here the houses lie low and their color is the same as the surrounding. Tans and browns. Earthy. As if the houses, too, are rocks that people just so happen to inhabit. It’s a peacefulness.

And yet, here I see full force what nature does to itself in order to maintain its self. Here, monsoons pour, sending water, drowning the land, trapping the inhabitants, sometimes destroying both land and inhabitants. And here, fires rage across dry land, burning trees and brush until it is an ashy shadow of what was.

But these, you see, are necessary. The plants living in the desert soak up the water like a thirsty boy scout sucking down the contents of a canteen. The roots, the drinking mechanisms of these plants drink greedily-no not greedily-needily, and store it, a dry version of animals storing food for hibernation. The plants need the monsoon even though it holds the possibility of drowning. And, so too, it needs the fire. It needs the lightning to strike, long after the rains have stopped, to light the dying and push the older forest into the past. Making it ash to feed the future. For, this is the way. Destruction in itself is also an act of creation. Just as you can depend on the rain, on the fire, so you can depend that once a land has been destroyed, that vegetation becomes ash, so, too can you depend on the bird carrying the seed or the seed itself clinging to the fur of an animal. That this seed, so small, will begin it all again.

And here, in Arizona, though this epiphany may be solely mine, I understood for the first time how the universe takes care of itself. It is not an understanding of answer. It is an understanding of lack of fear. That there is something, be it god or nature (or be they one in the same), that controls it all. That we may feel we have the power, but we have as much power as we are deemed worthy and if we should overreach this, the real power will know what to do to put us back in line. This, of course, is why humans should look for signs, not fear or cower or hide behind misinterpreted promises of selfish inaction, but look for them, so that we may correct them, so that we may do right by that higher power.